The first time Elena Giacci (Diné) heard of forced sterilization, she was at a conference. It was 1994, and she had just given a presentation on sexual violence in Native American communities, part of her job as an advocate and trainer for New Mexico’s Office of Family Representation and Advocacy.
“A woman came up to me after and said, ‘I think they did something to me down there,’” Giacci told Native News Online. “I asked her what she meant.”
The woman’s answer shocked her.
“She said, ‘I think they took something out.’”
That woman was the first of many who would disclose to Giacci that they had been sterilized without their full and informed consent. Some had given birth and unknowingly left the hospital with their tubes tied. Others had undergone unrelated surgeries and woken up from anesthesia without their uterus. Most told her the abuse took place at the hands of the federal agency that promised to provide them healthcare via trust and treaty obligations: Indian Health Service.
“So many women said, ‘No one believes me,’” Giacci said. “People have no clue that this even happened to us.”
Giacci, with the help of Oxford-educated human rights attorney Keely Badger, channeled decades of those disclosures into action. The women were the force behind a memorial approved unanimously by New Mexico lawmakers last month — House Memorial 32 — directing the New Mexico Indian Affairs Department and the New Mexico Commission on the Status of Women to investigate the history and ongoing impacts of forced and coerced sterilization of Native women in the state.
The memorial requests that the agencies present findings and recommendations to the governor and Legislature by Dec. 31, 2027, including proposals for a truth and reconciliation commission, a public memorial to victims and educational programs about the history of forced sterilization.
“It’s surreal,” Badger, who authored the memorial, told Native News Online. “There are so many extraordinary women who made this happen. It’s been a long time coming.”
The History
From 1907 until at least 2018, tens of thousands of Native women underwent procedures that rendered them unable to bear children without their free, prior and informed consent.
The practice thrived, unquestioned for decades. In the early 1970s, Native American doctor Dr. Connie Pinkerton-Uri (Cherokee, Choctaw) treated three Native women of childbearing age who underwent sterilization procedures by IHS; a 20-year-old who had a total hysterectomy, and two young women who received tubal ligations during appendectomy procedures.
Pinkerton-Uri conducted her own independent investigation that found 1 in 4 Native women had been sterilized without consent between 1960 and 1978.
A subsequent investigation by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that from 1972 to 1975, 3,406 sterilizations were performed in just four of the Indian Health Service’s 12 service areas.
In 2017, Badger wrote her Oxford dissertation on forced sterilizations. Her research notes that, per capita, 3,406 procedures would equal the sterilization of about 452,000 non-Native American women.
“I wanted to go right for what I thought was one of the most critical pieces of US history, particularly Indigenous women’s rights history that nobody was talking about, that was deeply understudied and that people weren’t looking at from a legal lens,” Badger said. “I really wanted to build a case that what happened to Native American women and women of color in the United States constituted crimes against humanity under international law, which it does.”
Badger’s research, pulled from disparate accounts, including Pinkerton-Uri’s work and the 1970s GAO report, found that as many as 70,000 Native women may have been sterilized at Indian Health Service clinics throughout the Southwest.
“It’s biological and cultural genocide,” Badger said. “When we think about the lost generations of children, we think of the loss of culture, of language, of traditions, of oral histories as a result of this, beyond just, of course, the horrendous damage to the women. “
Lone Voices Meet
On the other side of the world, Giacci was a lone voice talking about forced and coerced sterilization.
“At the very beginning of my presentations on sexual violence, I talk about sterilization,” Giacci said. “Bad news is, I was the only one who was talking about it.”
While woman after woman told Giacci that they had been made unable to bear children against their will, she faced a line of detractors.
“I received a tremendous amount of resistance and got vilified,” she said. “People would tell me, ‘You’re lying,’ and especially from people from the healthcare and IHS community. They were defensive over what I was saying.”
In 2020, Badger and Giacci were both invited to present at a conference on generational healing hosted by the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation.
“I met Keely, and within about eight minutes, we both brought up the fact that we’re kind of loners in the field of forced and coerced sterilization,” Giacci said.
The two women kept the conversation going. With Giacci’s relationships with New Mexico lawmakers and Keely’s legal acumen, they decided they had a shot at writing legislation that could yield justice for victims.
“We had discussions (about) ‘Do we think we can do this? Is this the right time?’” Giacci said. “Both of us are pretty significantly stubborn, and we said, ‘What the heck? Let’s see what we can do.’ Nobody else was doing it.”
The memorial passed in late February and was sponsored by five lawmakers, including two Native American women: Sens. Shannon Pinto (Dine) and Angel Charley (Laguna/Dine).
While other states have passed resolutions to investigate forced sterilization of marginalized groups, New Mexico’s memorial focuses specifically on Indigenous women.
Giacci and Badger will partner with the New Mexico Indian Affairs Department and Commission on the Status of Women to conduct an investigation into the scope and ongoing effects of the abusive practice. Now, they are putting together a task force to gather records from IHS and GAO.
Both women say they hope this is just the beginning of establishing a national Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate the forced sterilization of Native women nationwide.
“That would be absolutely paramount,” Badger said. “I do look a lot to the legacy that Nelson Mandela left in South Africa to bring South Africa out of apartheid … to try to heal a nation as hard as that is to do, and to make it clearly defined break in that history of oppression to one of acknowledgement and repair, and that this is something that is kind of the first step towards that nationally.”
Giacci said that bringing awareness to the abuses of forced sterilization will give victims a language to name and talk about what happened to them — a language to heal.
“Women will say, ‘I feel really stupid even bringing it up.’ ‘They thought I was lying.’ ‘They said I was making stuff up, and I was to blame.’” Giacci said. “It’s important to give people correct and good information, so (they can begin to understand), ‘Maybe this was something that happened to me.’
“We can help people know that it wasn’t their fault. That is just one of my few little wishes in this world.”
